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Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Spitting Ions in the Ether

Sometimes it just clicks. You look at someone, across the crowded room at a party, say, and you just know you’re going to spend the rest of your life with her. Or at least think she’s really cute but wonder why someone who’s clearly about fourteen years old is at a college party. And then it turns out the two of you are cast as the leads in a play and…

But that’s a story for another time.

I don’t know what possessed me to pick up an expensive import copy of Brian Eno’s Music for Films when I ran across it in a small independent record store in Washington D.C. when I was about seventeen. I’d never heard a single second Eno’s work, although I knew him from his collaborations with David Bowie. But buy it I did. And when I got home a few days later, I cranked up the stereo, having not the slightest idea what to expect.

I listened. And a bit less than an hour later when I was able to move again, I shut my mouth, picked up my eyeballs from where they’d fallen on the floor and popped them back in. And my life has never been the same since.

I’d bought my first ambient record.

I’m not sure how to describe ambient, so I’ll go with the man’s own description; these are the liner notes Brian Eno himself wrote in September 1978 for his album Music for Airports / Ambient 1:

AMBIENT MUSICThe concept of music designed specifically as a background feature in the environment was pioneered by Muzak Inc. in the fifties, and has since come to be known generically by the term Muzak. The connotations that this term carries are those particularly associated with the kind of material that Muzak Inc. produces - familiar tunes arranged and orchestrated in a lightweight and derivative manner. Understandably, this has led most discerning listeners (and most composers) to dismiss entirely the concept of environmental music as an idea worthy of attention.

Over the past three years, I have become interested in the use of music as ambience, and have come to believe that it is possible to produce material that can be used thus without being in any way compromised. To create a distinction between my own experiments in this area and the products of the various purveyors of canned music, I have begun using the term Ambient Music.

An ambience is defined as an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint. My intention is to produce original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue of environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres.

Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regularizing environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncrasies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these. Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to `brighten’ the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and leveling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.

Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.

How’s that? Can you imagine what it sounds like now? If not, I’ll try again.

Ambient, to me, often sounds like what I’d imagine a long space voyage would sound like if the spaceship were built in the late seventies and the designers were inspired by the sterile beauty of Stanley Kubrick’s films.

Is that closer? It’s usually fairly or very slow, although sometimes the beat is so ambiguous as to be almost missing altogether. On most of Eno’s ambient recordings there are rarely any percussion instruments used in the normal way. Things shift in and out of focus, appear and disappear, come and go, as though you’re traveling through a musical fog.

That sounds, to me, like lying back, all alone, staring up at the sky on a beautiful spring day in a verdant, pastoral (is there any other kind?) field which happens to be located on a spaceship bound for a distant galaxy on a decades-long voyage.

This is not music for everybody. Top Management, for instance, finds herself not soothed or comforted by it, as do I, but instead becomes rather violent. I have thus learned not to play it when she’s around. (Or, one might suggest, to begin playing it if she is and I wish she weren’t. As that very notion is inconceivable to me—who wouldn’t want to be around her all the time? I quit a good-paying job with great hours and killer benefits just to be around her nonstop—I would never dream up such a scenario. Some people are warped.)

During my college years I played Music for Films several times a week, I’d guess, when I wasn’t playing The Replacements or R.E.M. or Springsteen. It was a sort of aural palate cleanser. What’s more, it prepared me for my love of minimalism, although, yes, minimalism came first and inspired Eno. But more on minimalism another time.

The only other Eno I bought back then was Another Green World which is, for my money, his masterpiece. (Full disclosure: Eno has recorded so much that I’ve only heard about 75% of his official releases, I believe; however, I have heard everything that’s normally acclaimed a masterpiece, so there’s that.)

Another Green World is a bridge between Eno’s ambient work and his more traditional pop-related material. When I say "traditional," of course, I don’t really mean it’s traditional in the sense of Patti Page or The Monkees or Britney Spears—which also isn’t meant to knock any of them. I simply mean that some of the works in his catalog can fall into the rough category of a pop song, with choruses, verses, lyrics, drums, that kind o’ thang. He’s got albums of such material, although he very much went away from focussing on it in the 80s and 90s, and he’s got his ambient stuff.

Another Green World, like Bowie’s Low and "Heroes," has both. In fact, most of the album is actually ambient, something which is easy to overlook, so striking are the numbers with lyrics. Chief among them is the song "St. Elmo’s Fire."

I’ve never been entirely sure why this song smacked me over the head as it did the very first time I heard it, but driving around recently with The Boy, I played it a half-dozen times in a row and the thing still does a number on me.

It’s superficially a straight-forward pop song, three minutes long, three verses, three choruses, guitar solo, the whole regular schmeer. Yet it’s sort of a really catchy pop song done by an alien who’s really, really familiar with our culture and gets it completely…almost.

It starts off with some knocking, perhaps wood blocks, perhaps not and the sound of something, perhaps a tape, starting up. Then a few notes are repeated over and over on the piano, a driving motion that’ll serve as the pulse of the song. Some clattering percussion, almost devoid of rhythm, enters. Insistent chords bang out on another keyboard instrument, first insistently syncopated but subtly shifting so it’s instead squarely on the first downbeat.

And then Eno starts singing. He’s got a somewhat talky sort of voice but if it’s not necessarily much better than other talkers like Lou Reed (when Reed cares to try), it’s much more accessible and less grating. It may not knock Lennon or McCartney off their perches as amongst the greatest rock voices ever, but it’s unlikely to inspire hatred as Dylan, Young and Mascis do.

The first verse lets us know what we’re in for:

Brown Eyes and I were tired We had walked and we had scrambled Through the moors and through the briars Through the endless blue meanders

And without a pause we go into the chorus:

In the blue August moon In the cool August moon

What does any of this mean? What could endless blue meanders be? After listening hundreds of times, I have no idea. Nor, I realized recently, could I possibly care less. The words work. The sound of them, the images they convey, the tone they set, are all that matters. They sound good and somehow manage to mean nothing in a rather poetic way without being pretentious at all. They’re almost little more than another instrument, like the piano or the percussion or the guitar solo, yet weighted with some emotional resonance I don’t fully understand.

Another verse and another trip through the chorus gives us more of the same:

Over the nights and through the fires We went surging down the wires Through the towns and on the highways Through the storms in all their thundering In the blue August moon In the cool August moon

Then the final verse:

Then we rested in a desert Where the bones were white as teeth, sir And we saw St. Elmo’s Fire Splitting ions in the ether

Again, the scene set is beautiful and haunting and if we get no more than stray images and a hint of story supplied mainly by ourselves, it’s no less powerful for that.

And then comes what may be the most amazing part of the song: the guitar solo. As Eno is not one to bow to tradition just for tradition’s sake, there aren’t a lot of solos in his work. Yet here he’s got a guitar solo right smack dab in the standard place.

Except that it’s not. For one thing, rather than soloing over the verse chords or the chorus chords once, the guitarist, King Crimson leader and frequent Eno collaborator Robert Fripp, solos over the chorus chords, seems about to wrap things up, and then decides to go over another chorus. What’s more, when the lyrics kick back in for two more choruses, he keeps soloing, albeit more softly. Which means that very nearly one-third of the entire song is the guitar solo—and well over one-half if you include the sections where Eno is also singing over the solo—a ratio wildly out of balance for a pop song. And yet it works just fine. Perfectly, in fact.

But more than anything it’s the sound and style of the solo itself that’s so stunning. It’s not clear whether Fripp wasn’t sure what to play or whether he was just asking Eno what he was looking for, but Eno later said:

"...on ‘St. Elmo’s Fire’ I had this idea and said to Fripp, ‘Do you know what a Wimshurst machine is?’ It’s a device for generating very high voltages which then leap between the two poles, and it has a certain erratic contour, and I said, ‘You have to imagine a guitar line that has that, very fast and unpredictable.’ And he played that part which to me was very Wimshurst indeed."

So if you can just picture those two poles in the background in all the Frankenstein films, with the electricity sparking back and forth between them, you can imagine this solo. It’s a really gorgeous and melodic version of that.

And it’s the combination of the anarchic, blistering guitar solo, the odd instrumentation elsewhere in the song, the impressionistic lyrics and the sheer melodic appeal of the tune itself that makes this one of the great, albeit rather obscure, pop songs in history.

In the blue August moon In the cool August moon In the blue August moon In the cool August moon